distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any other stage of their human life can possibly give again."

We do help children and so, in a degree, help humanity at the best end. But this is haphazard and often adventitious. We prescribe for them hoping that they will get some good out of our prescription-which we usually make in excess so that they may get all that they need out of our giving too much. We do not exactly mean to waste them but neither do we mean to economize them or to so economize humanity. Salvation has no particular meaning for us as a practice.

In an article on "Musical Expression" the distinguished musician, Sternberg, says, "I often tell my pupils, play any way you mean to, only play some way and be sure that it is the way you mean to play.' Now frequently they stop right then and there and their look of perplexity shows plainly that they caught themselves at not having had any thought at all in their mind. Whenever I succeed in making them thus catch themselves at being so thoughtless I feel that I have gained much. The rest is usually easy."

Do we, does the church, mean to play on the great instrument of humanity, and is it playing in the way it means to? Do we mean that the church-to say nothing of the home-shall be educative in its entire administration? Do we mean to make it a house of nurture? Where are the evidences that we have set the child in

the midst, that we mean not to provoke and discourage him, that we realize that his nature determines the mode of his nurture, that we regard his objection to our adultism, and that we mean to act on the conviction that the basal way to help humanity is to help the child? "Play as if the Master were listening," says Schumann.

It is but a half-truth to say that the methods of Jesus were educational. The whole truth is that he not only educated his disciples, but that he meant to be educational, and that he was the model towards which in its final analysis the sanest modern education is tending. The farther scientific pedagogy probes its problems, the more nearly do its conclusions find their prototypes in the principles and methods of the great Teacher. Whether he walked or sat or talked or kept silent, whether he praised or rebuked, whether He was secret or open, whether he healed or turned aside and withdrew from sight-he was the consummate teacher and trainer. The one

unique thing about him as a teacher is that he seems never to have lost his educational consciousness or intent. He was the model

nurturer.

Similarly the church, standing, as Prof. E. A. Ross says, as "the repository of certain related ideas, convictions, ideals, symbols, and appeals which are admitted to have more efficacy in socializing the human heart than any other group of influences known to western civilization, should be par excellence the institutional executor

of the pedagogy of the Master Educator. In administration and in substance of instruction it should be an economic model, never wasting an atom of vital force by neglect or misdirection of energy.

Now the universal fact is that man wastes nothing so much as man. Life is loose with losses. Salvation is the imminent and perpetual need. Nature, science, and art alike repudiate loss. Life is essentially economic, and leakage is the one intolerable thing in the application of power to the world's work-whether it be mechanical, physiological, asthetic, moral, or spiritual.

Greatest of all world-powers, as the Christian church (including the home) is, we have scarcely begun to realize its possibilities. As an institution, the leakage, waste, and loss of power which the church sustains is due in large measure to the lack of an educational consciousness, the want of a sense of educational values, in every activity, interest, and influence. Says G. Stanley Hall, "All human institutions are educational, and educational values are the criteria by which everything is to be judged. The true work of education is included in everything that brings man to be more nearly perfect." Our Lord tells us, "Be ye therefore perfect."

In so far as the home and the church, as the "foci of effort," are responsible for the nurture and development of personal character, together with the culture of a social ideal-thus far are

the church and the home educational institutions quite as truly as the more systematically or logically organized school or college.

And thus far also it is morally obligatory on the church and the home to have an educational consciousness and to know something of the bases of educational method as understood in the light of modern psychologic progress. To say this, however, is to say virtually nothing more than that the educational function should be exercised in the spirit and in accord with the practice of Jesus; for there is nothing basal in the principles of sane, modern education that has not always existed as principle in Christianity, as we find it illustrated in the life of our Lord. The "new education" is essentially as old as the Christian era. Indeed, its central idea or law of a free-will self-activity received its first recorded sanction in Eden.

The church would seem to be the natural heir to the mode of Jesus as the modern trainer of men, and yet the church rests more or less in ignorance of, or in virtual defiance of, principles that are as plainly a part of the Gospel as is salvation or the Golden Rule. In other words, the weakness of the church lies largely in its failure to be consciously educative after the manner of the Master. Christian education is, therefore, not merely a matter of instruction in the tenets of the church or even in ethics, but it is a matter of consciously Christian method. Consequently it is not limited to "religious" in

struction, but is coextensive with the whole discipline of life. Professor Coe aptly says:

"Religious education has relations to general pedagogy that demand to be recognized and applied. The teacher of religion and the teacher of arithmetic are dealing with the same child. Possibly learning arithmetic has something to do with learning to be religious. In any case the principles of development in the one sphere cannot be altogether separated from those in the other."

Now, notwithstanding modern education, following the lead of Jesus, insists on setting the child in the midst and making him the centre of interest, it is true, as Professor Coe says, that the "weakest point in our campaign for bringing the world to Christ is the relation of the church to the young"; the "official status of children to the church has been altogether overshadowed by that of adults." Even the great Dr. Thomas Arnold was slow to give to youth its place. A recent writer says: "While his idea of education was wholly religious, his conception of the spiritual cultivation possible to boys would probably not pass unchallenged even now, when all sections of Christians unite in honoring him. In a letter written after his appointment, but before his induction, he said, 'My object will be, if possible, to form Christian men; for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make. I mean that from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in